Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (20 page)

“Just leave it to me, laddie. There’s not a valuable item in Boston what don’t come under the lamps of me or my boys. Now, I don’t suppose you saved any funds for a yard of beer or three, did you? The night’s still young!”

D
espite Bucko’s boast and his energetic ferreting, the Resonator proved distressingly hard to find. Days went by without a clue.
Only when Bran applied his deductive mind to the dilemma did inspiration strike. The necessity to keep the Morphic Resonator supplied with a continuous diet of electricity was the key to its location. Jellyneck-as-Bran could hardly spend all his time cranking the dynamo to charge the cells. But where could a steady, reliable source of current be found?

Right at the Gilead Toolmakers facility in Brighton, where a forward-looking manager named Norman Krim had been experimenting with the new technology’s applications to machine tools.

Bucko reported back after Bran’s hunch. “Your fetch goes to a locked room at the Brighton works at least once a day, to check on something mighty important. Your pa thinks he’s taking an interest in the family business.”

“That’s it! Round up some helpers and we’ll go in there tonight.”

B
ran winced when the lone watchman at the factory succumbed to a cosh upside the head. But that final obstacle to their goal could not be otherwise surmounted. Putting the guilt at the back of his mind for later grief, Bran hurried with Bucko and his two assistants to the door of the Resonator’s hiding place. Using a crowbar, Bucko snapped the hasp, and they were in—

—to confront by lantern light a grinning General Grant and Jellyneck-as-Bran, both men holding pistols trained upon the door, guarding the humming Resonator where it sat on a worktable.

The disloyal hired toughs turned and ran. The general let them go, confident of their silence regarding the illegal break-in. Bucko raised his crowbar menacingly, but thought better of it. Bran remained frozen in shock.

Hedley King said, “Your friend’s inquiries were very crude, Roland. Mr. Lincoln’s new Secret Service men, tasked to guard me as a candidate, were told to be alert for such feints, reporting all such to me, and they did not question why. And so I was able to
learn of your searches and to return here to protect my machine—and to chat with you.

“I realize now that my plans will never be safe from your interference, until you are dead—or until you join me wholeheartedly. I regret imposing this grotesque mask upon you at the outset, but my reading of your nature convinced me you would not go along with my schemes. I don’t want to kill you, Roland. You’re my natural-born son, after all. Just tell me you’ll embrace my cause, and you’ll soon be atop the world again, where we Kings rightfully belong.”

Bran found his voice. “Your cause! Your cause is pure selfishness!”

“No, Bran, it’s not. It’s the betterment of all mankind. Allow me to show you. Pella, step forth please.”

From out of the shadows emerged Bran’s mother, the living, radiant, queenly image stepping forth from his cherished ambrotype. Bran’s heart caught in his throat.

King said, “You see, son, already in this short time, with the aid of Grant’s pull, I’ve found a way to restore the soul. Pella, tell him.”

The dulcet, refined voice of Bran’s mother said, “It is true, son. I am Pella Brannock Gilead that was.”

Bran wanted desperately to believe. To have his mother restored to life—restored to
his
life, an offset to his superfluity of fathers. To feel free for the first time of the guilt of having caused her premature death by his very coming into being. Wasn’t that what he had been unconsciously seeking when he had so enthusiastically endorsed Hedley King’s researches and machinations?

“Mother—I want to believe! Prove to me it’s true! Please tell me more.”

To Bran’s acute senses, all the other interlocutors in the room seemed distant and suspended, as if they, too, hung on the words of the revenant woman. And if her first speech had been bland and calm, now her voice suddenly assumed a new dynamic emotional heft.

“Oh, Bran, I’ve so wanted this day to happen, but I never dared dream within the dream that is the afterlife that it ever could!
To see you all mature, so strong and brave and wise, satisfying all my fervent but nebulous hopes as I felt you being born amidst the pain. I feel blessed, and hopeful that this rare, impossible moment can be prolonged.”

Bran’s heart raced. “Mother, I, too! I can even bear this misshapen body if it means you will get a renewed lease on life!”

Pella’s eyes glowed with maternal adoration. “Maybe we can have it all, Bran, all that we’ve dreamed of. But my tenancy of this borrowed mortal clay feels so insecure at times, as if I were contending with another for possession, that I—”

Pella held the back of one hand to her forehead and swayed alarmingly.

“Mother! What’s wrong?”

Pella straightened and grinned in a ludicrously inappropriate manner. “Nothing’s wrong, son. Just a slight megrims. I swear by Saint Valentine, it’s so. Now, if you’ll only listen to Mr. King, your father, and do as he—You shitty
bastard
!”

This cause of this foul imprecation interrupting Pella’s instructive speech was the impact of Bucko’s heaved crowbar upon her shin. A welter of blue swearwords followed. Surely the gentle Pella had never been prone to such outbursts.

Bucko turned to Bran. “You told me about Trixibelle, and I knew that whore always swore by Saint Valentine. That ain’t your ma, Bran. Not right this minute, anyhow. And no matter how much you want her to be, you could never be sure twixt one moment and the next who you was talking to.”

Doubt and dark disappointment assailed Bran. To lose his mother almost in the same breath he had gained her! He wavered between endorsement and dismissal of Bucko’s warning. But then all uncertainty was instantly removed, along with Bran’s hopes, leaving him feeling as if his heart had been wrenched from his chest.

With the stolen countenance of Bran’s mother suffused with wrath, Trixibelle said, “Oh, I hate your stinking guts, Bucko MacMahon! And as for you, junior—maybe I didn’t bring you into this world, but I’ll sure enough take you out of it!”

She grabbed for General Grant’s gun and she and King wrestled for control of the weapon.

Bucko launched himself at a distracted Jellyneck.

Despairing yet determined, all selfish ambitions for his personal happiness fled, Bran hurled himself at the Resonator on its elevated stand, his squat form a living cannonball.

Over and backward the humming device toppled, to smash on the stone floor.

A flood of celestial radiance flared as the vril escaped through a crack in its vessel and instantly evanesced.

Bran got awkwardly to his feet. Inhabiting his own body again felt odd and uncomfortable.

Bucko had subdued the dwarf by throttling him.

Bran regarded Trixibelle, the woman who had been transfigured temporarily into Pella, and whose sinful soul had ejected Pella’s spirit. The coarse doxy seemed confused by her reversion, no longer foulmouthed. Her eyes met Bran’s. And then the oddest, saddest, most unexpected thing happened, powered perhaps by the slightest traces of vril remaining in the atmosphere.

Trixibelle whispered in Pella’s genuine tones: “Son, it had to be this way. Live well, with my love—”

Bran mastered the hot tears that followed this last blessing, and confronted his natural father.

Here was the source of so much grief and pain, right from the minute the man had lured Pella away from Warner Gilead! Bran’s brief equanimity evaporated.

Hedley King had regained control of his pistol from Trixibelle. Vibrating to Bran’s new rancor, King raised the gun in Bran’s direction.

“You’ve ruined the labors of a lifetime!”

“And you’ve ruined several lifetimes!”

Still menacing Bran, King began backing away toward the exit. “I can rebuild my engine. There’s more vril to be had as well! I’ll be ruler of the world one day! And I’ll be sure to leave your mother’s soul to rot in hell!”

Enraged, Bran hurled himself at Hedley King.

The gun boomed, and Bran felt his pate creased. Then he collided with King and brought him down.

The older man’s skull struck the iron footing upon which the Resonator had rested, issuing a sickening, melon-bashing sound.

Once standing, Bran regarded his natural father, all broken and unconscious. The man’s ragged breathing suddenly clattered to a halt, like a lame horse failing.

Liquid trickled down one of Bran’s cheeks. He raised a hand to feel, and found only blood from his wound.

Bucko came to Bran’s side. To Bran’s surprise, Jellyneck went to King and began to weep. Trixiebelle had vanished.

“Let’s go, boyo,” said Bucko. “It’s all over now.”

“One minute.” Bran rummaged among the wreckage, until he found the lock of Pella’s hair.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

Bran turned then and walked away from the worst of his past.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE I

The Thirteenth Child

I have twelve brothers and sisters, all older than me. Each was born under a different new moon, a year and a month apart, in what must have been a heroic feat of planning on our parents’ part. And when I say born, I am using that word the old-fashioned way, dropping covered in blood and snot from betwixt our mother’s legs.

See what I mean about the planning? If you’re going about reproducing the sensible way, with glass dishes and bottled lightning in a nice, safe laboratory, then you can have children any time you want. In any quantity you want. A dozen kids? Install a bigger autoclave, make sure there’s enough fuses in the junction box, and you’re off to the races.

Not Mom and Dad. No, no. When you’re the Queen of Summer and the Winter King, you have to be
traditionalists
. You cut your clockwork gears by hand—or at least have lackeys to do that—and fire your boilers with charcoal burned from your own estates’ coppices by hereditary tribes of hunchbacked charcoal burners with overdeveloped forelocks and a pious sense of duty. If it were possible for steam to come with a pedigree, ours would have.

So they created their children the old-fashioned way, and Mother suffered through nine waxings and wanings of the moon as women always had since Lilith carved her initials in the bricks of the wall around the First Garden, and everyone was made miserable thereby. My older sisters assure me that being the last child meant that I missed out on all the fun of thirteen continuous years of pregnancy, a child born every fourteen moons until I, the final offspring, came into the world on a night when the new moon happened to coincide with the winter solstice.

As you might well imagine, being the thirteenth child of two of the most magical people in the world, I was hardly destined for a life of needlework and horsewomanship. My oldest siblings, aged twelve and eleven at the time of my birth, had already evinced talents as fae as fae could be, and so people referred to them as “the good fairies.” I understand there were decent odds being laid down in the servants’ wing on whether all of the children would turn out that way.